


The Secrets in the Silence

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Aida (opera)
Genre: Guilt, Other, Unrequited Love, Yuletide, bereavement, challenge:New Year Resolutions 2009, recipient:Elena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-07
Updated: 2010-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-05 22:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador





	The Secrets in the Silence

In the end.

In the end, there is nothing so terrible as silence.

The moon rises over the Nile, and the steady lapping of the water and the chirruping of the insects in the warm air beat the silence away. She walks by the waterside, out of earshot of any other human being, out of the terrible echoing silence of the temple.

She has not spoken. She has the power in her throat to shatter the silence, but she is afraid even to open her mouth. She knows now that destroying the thing that offends her solves nothing.

She walks fast, just too fast to be comfortable. Her breath is ragged and the soles of her feet burn, and this is how she knows she is alive - _human_. Here she is: a princess, alone, on foot, vindicated and dissatisfied. How? How can this be? She reflects on the divinity inherent in royalty, and wonders numbly how divinity could miscarry so. Perhaps she is, after all, merely mortal. A strange thought.

(A cramped stone chamber, stifled with hot breath and cold stone. Two voices, two breaths. Two deaths.)

Where are the trumpets now? She would call them forth, bid them sound one endless, ringing call over all Egypt, a call to rally the troops and to awaken the dead. It is strange to think that she could call and no one would come, that no one is here to attend to her beyond a few sleepy crocodiles. Almost as strange is the thought that she can call her lover (for so she chooses to designate him), but that he will not answer her; that she can call her slave (for so she was), but she will not come.

(Two hearts, two bodies. Two deaths.)

She cannot quite bear to think of them, locked in one another's arms in the friendly quiet of eternity. Happy or unhappy - she does not know which, and does not want to - wherever they are now, they are together, and she is alone in the silence.

The girl was a princess, too, or so they said. She was inclined to discount what they said - the daughter of a primitive chieftain of a troublesome tribe, and the daughter of the Pharoah of Egypt were hardly the same thing. _A worthy adversary_, her father had said of the King of Ethiopia. A mirthless smile curving her lips, she applies the words to his daughter. _A worthy adversary_. A tall girl, dark and fine-boned, dignified, silent except when spoken to. Often Amneris had called her insolent, to herself and to her face, but every time it had been unjust.

How odd that she could be unjust when she was the daughter of Justice personified; how odd that divinity could err. The universe is suddenly off-kilter, and it is a marvel that there was still sky above her and ground beneath her feet. Amneris knows the difference between dignity and insolence, and the only reason that she is using one word to mean the other is that it hurts less, and more.

The water is lapping gently against the bank, and the moon is high now. Sometimes a night bird hoots, but in the hush between she might be the only living thing. Now the palace must be asleep. She is glad to be outside. She could not bear to be in bed now, alone, without the comforting rhythm of another woman's breathing.

Aida never slept. Or, Aida never let Amneris know she slept. She was always watchful, always alert, holding secret after secret inside herself. Speaking only when spoken to, sleeping only when alone. Amneris could not have slept, now, without the calm, measured breath of the slave to lull her like the breeze on the Nile. Never able to ask now, she knows without thinking that Aida would never have slept in the same room as her mistress, because her secrets were too precious. (And when her secrets were secret no longer, she dissolved and died.)

She sits down by the river, and the night is suddenly chill. She is aware of her own breathing, quick and laboured after her exertions. She is breathing. She is alive.

She remembers the cold feeling of triumph when she prised that first secret out. She could not have known then (she tells herself) that it was the beginning of the end, that every secret that any of them had would come out and have to speak itself against the relentless blank silence, crumbling to pieces and taking its keeper with it.

(Somewhere two people embrace, and are warm, somewhere, but here there is only the cold and the solitude. Somewhere the dead are less lonely than the living.)

Aida was made of secrets. Somewhere between her body and her soul they nested, the only thing left that were all her own. Perhaps they were all that sustained her in the shame and sorrow of being a captive in a strange land. Perhaps that was why, when Amneris ripped the first, most terrible secret from her, she stopped fighting. She made a half-hearted effort to run away, but she was collapsing as she went, a house whose walls were falling in. (Amneris never realised that she knew so much about her, but her secrets are screaming in the silence.)

She remembers a warm body pressed against her, strong arms around her. (Whose?) It could not have been so. Strange, that the daughter of Truth personified could deal in lies, and stranger still that she could tell them to herself. Strange, that the daughter of Truth personified cannot tell the difference between dreams and waking, or that, if she can, she is choosing the dream over what really was, and is. She remembers calm breathing, and dark eyes filled with love and kindness. Perhaps it was just sadness.

A bird screeches, and when the echo dies away the night is quiet.

In the silence there is nothing to drown out the voice that tells her that it all could have been different. In the silence it is her fault. In the silence two people watch her, and see only each other, for ever.

In the end there is only silence.

In the end.

Read [posted comments](http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/87/thesecrets_cmt.html).


End file.
